by Helen Doss
So the children played happily with the toys in the nursery while I prepared a bed for myself on the couch, which was even supplied with a pillow and a quilt. I washed diapers in the washbowl of the adjoining rest room, found some string, and hung up my wash. At bedtime, the boys weren’t sleepy after such long naps that afternoon, so they tiptoed with me to the balcony which ran around the interior of the second floor of the church. We sat there in the dark, a boy cuddled in each of my arms, and enjoyed the festive gaiety of a wedding reception, in full swing below.
After the party had drifted away, the lights downstairs had all been turned off and the church locked up, we tiptoed back through the dark and quiet church to the nursery room. I dug into my almost-empty grocery sack for some graham crackers and canned grapefruit juice, which provided our version of punch and wedding cake. The boys feel asleep as soon as I tucked them into their cribs, with cracker crumbs outlining their dreamy smiles. I settled myself on the couch. The blizzard was moaning outside. There were ghostly steps squeaking down in the basement, strange sighs from the surrounding pitch-blackness, and spooky rattles up in the church garret. I pulled the quilt over my head and went to sleep.
Next day was Sunday. I took down our washing, dressed the boys for Sunday school, and gathered together our things. While I attended a young-adult class and the church service, Timmy and Teddy went to the nursery class. When I turned them over to their teacher, it was not the new baby, but three-year-old Teddy who hung back, afraid of all the strange children. Timmy, even then the master of any situation, at home anywhere and with anyone, took Teddy’s hand encouragingly, patted it, and drew him over to the toy shelf.
That afternoon the trains started running again. We arrived home with no further delays or trouble. When we walked into the house, the children were overjoyed to see Teddy and me, and they welcomed Timmy with open arms.
All except Laura.
Before we had known that our latest would be a boy, when I was still writing letters, I had asked the children how they would like a new brother or sister. They had been enthusiastic. When Timmy arrived, however, it was another matter to Laura. Her sudden jealousy burst in a shower of bitter sparks from her brown almond eyes. She pinched him whenever she thought no one was looking; she complained loud and long, “I don’t like that brother-sister. Let’s throw that little old brother-sister away!”
In time she fell in love with him, as most people did on sight. There was something irresistible about his quick grin and basso-profundo chuckle, the disarming friendliness radiating from his round face and large, pixie-tilted brown eyes. He became the official greeter in our family, the first to shout “Hi!” to a stranger, even when “Hi” was the only word he could say.
Six months after Timmy joined the family, Carl returned from a trip on church business to San Francisco. He hugged me, looking like a little boy about to confess he has been swiping green apples.
“What have you been up to?” I asked suspiciously.
“How would you like to adopt another boy?”
“You darling!” I said. “Donny still complains about our always finding children the wrong sizes! I thought it was time we started looking again, but I didn’t know how to broach—”
Carl hesitated. “Well, this boy I found out about, well, he happens to be younger—”
“You found one? How young?”
“As a matter of fact,” Carl admitted, “he was just born.”
I was disappointed. “Really, honey, that’s too young.”
“He’ll grow. Just give him time, he’ll grow.”
“Let’s not get silly,” I said. “He’ll never catch up with Donny, and you know it.”
“But nobody wants him. He’s Japanese and Burmese and Korean, and the agency just doesn’t have anyone on their waiting list who is asking for that kind of baby. I thought you couldn’t resist giving a home to a child that nobody wanted.”
“I couldn’t, before. But there comes a limit,” I said. “I’d be willing to squeeze in one more, just so Donny could have his brother the right size. But no more babies! I’ve raised my share of babies.”
Carl pulled papers from his pocket. “I’ve already been interviewed by the agency. I’ve given them all the references of the other agencies—”
“I’m tired of seeing dirty baby bottles gathering on the sink, and diapers always on the line—”
“We can go down to San Francisco,” Carl went on, waving the papers. “We can look at him in the hospital. If we like him we can bring him home, simple as that.”
“It’s not as simple as that. I don’t—”
“Once we see him you’ll feel sorry for him. So helpless, without a friend in the world—You’ll change your mind.”
“I won’t change my mind,” I said stubbornly, “because I’ve already changed my last diaper. And made my last formula. The diapers I’ve washed so far would make a pile from here to the moon. And that is exactly where I’m going, if anyone brings a wailing, wet-bottomed baby into this house.”
“Listen,” Carl said. “You’ve done more than your share of the choosing, so far. It’s time I got a chance to choose us a child, for a change.” He started out of the room, whistling. Several children came in and asked, “Where you going, Daddy?”
“Going crazy, I guess,” Carl said.
“Me go, too,” Timmy demanded.
“Me, too,” I called after Carl. “And I’ll bet I get there before you do.”
Laura looked around, frowning. “Who’s going to stay here with us kids?”
“We’re not going anywhere, princess,” Carl said, kissing her. “We’re just teasing each other.”
“Oh,” Laura said.
“Except your mother,” Carl said. “She just said she might take a trip to the moon.”
“Me, too?” Timmy hollered.
When we went to fetch home our new baby, the children came along. At the hospital we left Donny, Laura, Susan, Teddy, Rita, and Timmy in the waiting room, dancing up and down like sand fleas, while Carl and I took the elevator to the maternity floor. The head nurse was still out to supper, so we perched on a bench in the corridor, swinging our feet. Mothers-to-be paced in and out of their rooms, robes stretched to lap over tummies, and slippered up and down the corridor with varying degrees of patience and impatience. A white-coated worker pushed by us, his bucket on rollers, mopping the floors. We held our feet up in the air and Carl said, “Fve always been away at school, before, so I never got to watch my other babies grow up from day to day. This is going to be fun.”
“The more the merrier,” I said.
“Do you feel any different, now you are about to become the mother of seven?”
“My feelings are mixed,” I said. “What do you suppose he’ll look like?”
Another couple joined us on the bench, the husband holding his wife’s arm as if she were made of porcelain. “Are you just leaving with your baby, too?” the girl asked.
“Yes,” I said. “What’s yours, boy or girl?”
“Girl,” she said. “We’re naming her Linda Lee. What’s yours?”
“Boy,” I said. “His name will be Alexander Paul, but we’ll call him Alex, for short.”
“Who knows!” the girl said, laughing in her happiness. “They might even grow up and meet on a blind date. They could marry, and never realize their parents brought them home at the same time from the same hospital!”
“Who knows?” I said. “Stranger things have happened.”
A nurse opened a door, accompanied by a background chorus of wails. “Reverend and Mrs. Doss?” she called.
We stood up, Carl and I.
She took my package of baby clothes. “Would you like to come in and watch us dress your little boy?”
We followed her into the nursery and watched her pick up the infant making the most noise. All you could see were his tonsils, which were nearly as red as his face, and the slits of his tightly closed eyes. Under the damp fringe of black hair, his t
iny face looked completely and unmistakably Oriental, although he was crying so hard you couldn’t make out the details.
As Carl proudly bore our blue-bundled siren out into the hall, the nurse motioned the other couple to enter. Passing us, the young mother smiled. “Let me see my little girl’s future date!”
I pulled back the corner of the blanket, and the girl’s blue eyes widened. She stared at Carl and me, and again at our Alex. Then she rallied, covering her bewilderment with a tremulous smile.
“It’s a wonderful world,” Carl said, “isn’t it?”
When we emerged from the elevators and sailed into the waiting room, the other six children raced over to us like noisy, joyful puppies, falling all over each other to see their wailing baby brother. “Here he is!” they shouted to passing nurses, other occupants of the waiting room, and anyone who would listen. “See, we said he was coming! Whoopee!”
There was no shushing the delighted children, and Alex was adding his share of the noise. The quickest way to restore peace and quiet to the hospital was to get out quick, with our whole family. We did.
Alex cried all the way home, in his basket, wedged in among his tightly packed sisters and brothers. Donny listened to the wails with growing concern, until he could stand it no longer.
“Mama!” he burst out indignantly. “If you don’t stop and feed that baby, or something, he’ll be dead before we get home.”
Alex continued to cry most of his first night; then he suddenly decided he liked it with us, and rarely cried after that. He was an unusually amiable baby, cooing contentedly in his crib, watching us out of his mysterious, dark, “slanted” eyes. The children were thrilled with the adventure of a new baby in the house; everyone, that is, except Laura.
Donny volunteered to be the baby-buggy pusher. Susie offered to sing Alex songs.
“I play with baby,” Timmy grinned. “Make baby happy.”
“I’ll find him a nice bug for a pet,” Rita said. “But I’ll keep it for him until he’s older, and won’t squush it.”
“I’ll hold the pins when you change his diaper,” Teddy said, “so he won’t get stucked.”
“I hope he does get stucked,” Laura muttered under her breath.
Eventually Laura’s feminine and maternal self won out over her jealousy. The daily care of a tiny baby turned out to be full of fascinating details to be watched, and imitated with her dolls.
One afternoon Laura had her doll laid on a folded diaper on the couch. She pretended to give her doll a good dusting from an empty talcum-powder can, while the other small children stood watching.
“You shaking snow on dolly,” Rita asked, “like Mama do Alex?”
Timmy chuckled. “Not snow. Dat’s pepper.”
“Pepper’s black, silly,” Susie said. “Maybe it’s salt?”
“You all don’t know anything about babies,” Laura said with motherly dignity. “This here is telephone powder.”
CHAPTER 9
Farmers in the Dell
WHEN we moved to Forestville, we were too busy to think about putting in a garden, especially with the extra church work at first, then the adoptions of Timmy and Alex.
Finally our budget stared me in the face and I knew that a garden was something more than just a nice thing to have. The time had come when it was a plain, unvarnished necessity.
“We’ll simply have to raise part of our food,” I told Carl, after adding up our grocery bills in a stunned silence. He was earning $2800 a year now. His income had been rising steadily, but the postwar cost of living had risen more steadily.
“Good idea,” he murmured. He was working on a sermon.
“The salary doesn’t go very far, for nine people.”
He shook his head absently.
“The soil here must be rich, because the weeds come nearly to my shoulder. In fact they’re so high I couldn’t possibly spade them under, myself. So that’s where you come in.”
“Ummm,” Carl murmured, crossing something out and writing furious notes on the next page.
“Everyone in Forestville is putting in a spring garden, already. You ought to get out with a spade, first thing in the morning.”
“Sure,” Carl said. “Can you remember exactly how that quotation from St. Francis of Assisi goes, something about where there is hatred let us sow love . . . ?”
“I could look it up in a book,” I said. “Besides, it would be good exercise.”
Carl looked up, puzzled. “Since when is reading a book good exercise?”
“I was talking about you digging us a garden. Where there is hunger, let us sow vegetables.”
“Oh,” Carl said. “Oh, the garden. Well, don’t fret about it. I’ll get to it, when I’m not so busy.”
But Carl continued busy. Sunday services at two churches, pastoral calls in the homes, membership-training classes, evening discussion groups, choir practice, potluck dinners, church socials, committee meetings, official board meetings—was there no end? The weeds in the back yard continued to flourish, and so did our grocery bills.
“If you could just start the spading,” I said wistfully, “I could be planting seeds.”
“We’ll dig the ground for you, Mama,” Donny volunteered.
“Just give us a shubble,” Teddy said.
“You children may use the shovels in the garage,” I said. “But you couldn’t possibly turn the ground over, if Mama can’t.”
The next time I looked, the children had a hole five feet deep beside my clothesline post, where the weeds had been tromped down. The clothesline post gave a sigh and toppled in.
“But you children have to keep digging sideways, not straight down, if you want a garden,” I explained. “Anyway, I think this is too big a job for you.”
“Anyway, we’re tired of digging,” Donny said, and they all drifted off, leaving the shovels scattered in the weeds.
Like the little red hen, I decided to do it myself. After my first back-cracking day, I had but one row turned under, and planted to radishes. The next day I was inspired. Instead of bothering to spade under the weeds between my rows, I would skip along and just dig the actual rows needed for planting. I planted a strip of carrots that day. The next day, two feet down in the weeds, I spaded another row and put in corn. During the succeeding two weeks I planted more corn, three kinds of squash, bush beans, leaf lettuce, Swiss chard, beets, and turnips. When all my seeds were in, I dropped the spade, hoe, and garden gloves in the corner of the garage, took my last soaking bath, stuck Band-Aids on my blisters, and decided that if I ever looked at a garden again it would be too soon.
A month later, Carl stopped in the middle of a beeline to the church, and did a double take. At first glance, the back yard seemed to be nothing more than the same old weeds. Then he noticed, in the narrow ribbons of earth, in the bottoms of the sunless weed canyons, long wavering rows of pale sprouts.
“Mama’s garden,” Teddy explained.
“Purty, hmmm?” Timmy added.
“Pretty neglected,” Carl sighed. Not able to bear the sight of anything helpless, tiny, and in need, he returned to the house and changed into overalls. In a few days, the whole back yard was turned under and neatly weeded. We had a real garden at last.
Little brown Teddy was Carl’s right-hand man in the garden. He liked to water the seedlings with his sprinkling can. One day he told Timmy, “I’m playing God. I’m making rain for all the thirsty plants to drink.”
“How they drink?” Timmy asked. “I don’t see they got any mouth.”
“You don’t unnerstand because you only two years old,” Teddy said. “When you four years old like me, you unnerstand things.”
But even Teddy found some things hard to understand. When trucking the weeds off to the compost heap in his wagon, he asked Carl, “Why you pull them out, Daddy?”
“They crowd out our vegetables,” Carl told him. “They keep out the sun and hog all the water. They won’t let our garden grow.”
Teddy squat
ted back on his heels and shook his head. “I don’t think God ought to make weeds. I think God make a mistake.”
Donny was conspicuous by his absence when weeding was done.
“I’ll dig him his own patch,” Carl said. “Maybe planting his own garden will awake his interest.”
Offered a choice of seeds, Donny chose popcorn. He planted it in a rocket burst of high enthusiasm, telling us how we would all enjoy bushels of hot, buttered popcorn that winter.
The family garden was watered by a large, central sprinkler, but Don’s plot was off to itself.
“You’ll have to bring the hose over there,” Carl told him. “Your garden will need lots of water during the hot summer.”
Donny watered his garden faithfully for three days, and then forgot it. Scorching heat, and no water, produced a sad row of very stunted cornstalks which bore no ears. Late that fall, in a cold November rain, Carl saw Donny in raincoat and boots, out in his garden sprinkling the yellowed stalks with the hose.
“What in the world are you doing?” Carl called from the window.
“I forgot to water my garden,” Donny shouted. “I’m trying to make my popcorn grow.”
Rita found our garden more intriguing than Donny did. When Carl was hoeing, she followed behind and collected the slugs that turned up. Carl thought she was helpfully dumping them into the incinerator, but actually she was collecting them in a tomato can for pets. While I was hanging up the wash in the side yard, Rita went upstairs to play. Half an hour later I heard her sobbing in the kitchen. I came in and took her in my arms.
“I guess something bite her,” Timmy commented.
“What?”
“Dunno,” Timmy said. “Something bited me and I squash him, and he got green guts.”
“No,” Rita sobbed, “that’s not it. All my baby-snails-withouten-any-shells, they all gone. I leaved them here onna kitchen table in my can, and now they all runned away.”
“Your slugs?” I stepped back, skidded on one, and my arms and legs flew up while the rest of me whammed down.
“Mama, quit,” Rita squealed. “You walk on one, and now you sitting on one.”